Increasingly, individuals for business and personal reasons are relying on handheld computing devices, such as smart phones with computing and/or data networking capabilities, personal digital assistants (PDA's), etc. With this increased usage comes an increased risk associated with losing vital data that has not yet synchronized to a more permanent device or media.
Handheld devices include a variety of operating systems (OS's), one such OS is Windows CE®. Windows CE® can be problematic for a variety of reasons. For example, handheld devices running Windows CE® can be manually reset via a hard reset; a hard reset erases user application data; so, a device owner loses all data previously saved on the device during a hard reset.
Furthermore, conventional hard resets for handheld devices do not require any user authorization to be processed. So, a user can inadvertently issue a hard reset on his/her device or a malicious user that gains momentary access to an authorized user's device can perform a hard reset. It may even be that a child of the user or someone that is authorized to use the device inadvertently performs a hard reset on the device. In some situations, it may be that the device acquires a virus via a network connection or via something loaded on the device and it is the virus that performs the hard reset.
What ever the reason, once a hard reset is processed the legitimate user can lose vital data that has not yet been synchronized off the handheld device. This can be devastating to the user as well as any enterprise that employs the user. So, not only do inadvertent hard resets require no authorization to be processed, the hard resets have catastrophic consequences on the users and enterprises of the users because of the loss of data that occurs with hard reset operations.
Therefore, what is needed is a more secure mechanism for authorizing and performing hard resets of handheld devices.